[WikiEN-l] Should we block unregistered AOL users? (was: [Wikitech-l] User block changes)

[Ilmari Karonen]

As some of you may have noted, we now have a couple of new options to 
choose when blocking users.  Tim Starling, who implemented the feature, 
posted the following clarification on the wikitech-l list:

Tim Starling wrote:
> A couple of people asked me about interaction between various kinds of 
> blocks and block options, and indeed, in some cases the behaviour was 
> undefined or accidental. I've now implemented the following rules:
> 
> * The "anon only" and "prevent account creation" options will be silently 
> ignored on username blocks.
> * The precedence of blocks in cases of conflict, from highest to lowest, is:
>    * Username block
>    * Single IP block
>    * Range block
>    * Autoblock
> 
> This holds regardless of the anon-only option. This means that anon-only 
> range blocks or IP blocks can be used to mitigate the effects of autoblocks 
> on shared IP addresses, because an anon-only block will allow logged in 
> users to edit regardless of the presence of a matching autoblock. This has a 
> potential to be counterintuitive -- unblocking someone's IP can in fact 
> cause them to be blocked. But I thought it was better than the other solutions.

Given the above, would it now be advisable to block the entire AOL proxy 
  pool from editing by unregistered users?  This would have the side 
effect that AOL users would no longer be hit by random autoblocks.

(If you're unfamiliar with the AOL proxies and why they're a problem for 
us, please see [[Wikipedia:Advice to AOL users]] and [[Wikipedia:Dealing 
with AOL vandals]], plus the associated talk pages.)

-- 
Ilmari Karonen